Architect Portman, Aka Mr. Atrium, Now Has A Hotel Of His Own

May 14, 1987|By Paul Gapp, Architecture critic.

The man who invented the wow-look-at-this-fantastic-lobby! hotel style has just designed and built a new hotel in San Francisco and named it for himself.

Atlanta architect-entrepreneur John C. Portman is the fellow who pushed the atrium lobby to greatness, of course, and while ``The Portman`` is the smallest hotel he ever built, it is also probably the most luxurious.

The Portman is 21 stories tall, offers 348 rooms and was built a cost of more than $200,000 a room, which is how such things are measured in the accommodation business. Amenities range from a fleet of Rolls Royce Silver Shadows (to collect guests at the airport) down to television sets in the bathrooms.

Steel framed and clad with earthquake-resistant brick panels, the hotel presents arched windows and colonnade detailing calculated to make it contextual with older structures nearby. An atrium lobby? Naturally. Exposed elevator cabs? But assuredly. This is the Portman, after all, and it will open this summer.

Other news of spectacular, controversial and otherwise notable architecture:

-- Chicago`s Helmut Jahn has designed a 52-story office skyscraper for Frankfurt, West Germany, that will become Europe`s tallest building. About a dozen other major towers have been proposed for the city, but approval of them by municipal officials is expected to be granted slowly and cautiously.

Some 20 years ago, violent demonstrations resulted when Franfurt first began approving buildings of from 20 to 30 stories in an area of historic lowrise houses. Germany`s small but determined environmentalist party, the Greens, is still opposed to all high-rises.

-- A bitter controversy over adding a wing to the National Gallery in London has finally been settled--or so everyone hopes. The messy design battle began about six years ago when the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill won a competition to design the structure facing Trafalgar Square. SOM`s scheme was later scuttled, partly on esthetic grounds and partly because of political pressure to give the job to a British firm.

Now the design commission has gone to the Philadelphia firm of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, selected after another worldwide search for appropriate architects. Robert Venturi has come up with a Neoclassical look intended to be in sympathy with the original museum building.

-- Also in London, a 19th-Century water pumping station will be converted at a cost of $7.5 million into a thick-walled, soundproof rehearsal and recording studio for the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a distinguished British orchestra. The public will be able to view rehearsals from behind one- way glass in a public foyer.

-- By this time everyone knows that the new U.S. embassy in Moscow is a disaster because the Soviets implanted so many electronic listening devices in its walls. What many news reports fail to mention is that structural flaws in the building make it unsafe and will cost $1.1 million to correct. This is in addition to an earlier $90 million in cost overruns on a building that was originally supposed to cost $190 million. Another usually unreported fact is that the fortresslike structure is possibly the ugliest embassy ever built anywhere.

-- The only example of Chicago-style architecture in Ottawa, Canada, is about to undergo a $40 million renovation and expansion after years of neglect and the threat of destruction. It is the seven-story Daly Building, a limestone-clad structure designed as a department store in 1905 by Canadian architect Moses Chamberlain Edey.

Preservationists fought to save the building, vacant since 1978, because of its unique Chicago ``School`` style in which the frame is expressed externally by a strong, simple grid surrounding large windows. In its new life, the Daly will be transformed into a skylighted retail and office structure. The redesign is by the Montreal architecture firm of Desnoyers Mercure and Michelange Panzini.

-- Environmentalists in New York are expected to protest a proposed high- rise hotel, apartment and commercial complex on a platform extending over the Hudson River. Similar projects on landfill have been attacked because of potential threats to fish and plant life. Developers say the new complex just west of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center would not disturb the river because its waters would continue to flow naturally beneath the platform.

-- The downfall of television evangelist Jim Bakker apparently will not interfere with plans to build a 30,000-seat, $100-million church at the Heritage U.S.A. religious community in Ft. Mill, S.C. The church will be the largest in the nation and is intended to resemble England`s famous Sydenham Crystal Palace designed by Joseph Paxton in 1851.